Kanye West caught visiting Pirate Bay—possibly to download music software

Kanye West, after reportedly considering legal action against The Pirate Bay for facilitating mass piracy of his new album, The Life of Pablo, has been caught visiting The Pirate Bay. One of the browser tabs pictured in the above screenshot indicates that he may have been looking for a way to illicitly download for specialized music-editing software, which prompted the software's developer to accuse the rapper of piracy.

Early Wednesday morning, Kanye tweeted a photo that showed him listening to Sufjan Stevens on YouTube. If you look closely at Kanye's browser tabs, you can see that prior to watching the video he was researching some advanced wavetable synthesizer software called Serum on the piracy site.

Deadmau5, music producer and co-founder of Xfer Records, which makes Serum, was not amused by Kanye's actions. "What the fuck @kanyewest ... Can't afford serum? Dick," he tweeted. A few minutes later he followed up with this zinger: "Let's start a Kickstarter to help @kanyewest afford a copy of Serum."

Amusingly, Kanye also seems to have a MacKeeper tab open, along with two more tabs—Media Downloader and (1) Attention!—that are probably up to no good. Perhaps those tabs were just automatic pop-ups from his visit to The Pirate Bay, though. (Also, while we're at it, it doesn't look like Kanye was actually visiting The Pirate Bay in this instance, but rather another piracy site that also calls itself The Pirate Bay, which probably gets its files from The Pirate Bay.)

Further Reading

As for why Kanye might want to pirate Serum, which retails for $190/£140, that isn't clear. The artist has previously stated that, despite being one of the most successful artists of the last two decades, he's actually $53 million in debt. But this is Kanye. He has access to some of the best recording studios in the world. Maybe he wanted to try the software out before he bought it. Or maybe Kanye, like every other human out there, just likes free stuff.

Kanye hasn't yet responded to the hundreds of angry tweets that he received last night.

In February, Kanye West was reportedly considering legal action against The Pirate Bay after his new album, The Life of Pablo, was downloaded almost a million times in under a week. The Life of Pablo is exclusively available via the subscription streaming service Tidal, which is probably why the album was pirated so many times. And yes, it is ironic that Kanye opened up YouTube to listen to Sufjan Stevens, rather than using Tidal (which he is a co-owner of, incidentally, along with some other big artists including Deadmau5...)

Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb